The Romantic painters were already addicted to a cult of the horse as an aristocratic beast.. ..From Géricault and Constantin Guys [both Romantic Fre… - Marino Marini

Until the end of the fascist era and of the war [World War 2.], I continued to hark back to the sober realism [in his human figure sculptures, then] of the artists of the Etruscan funerary figures, or the sculptors of some Roman portraits, especially the earlier ones. My own way of reacting against the imperialist pathos of official Fascist art continued, until 1944, to consist in identifying my art very consciously with my private life, so that I never allowed myself any form of expression that might seem too blatantly public.

We must enter into the spirit of the character [for making a portrait]: here the challenge is to place this figure in the human space, to work out what he represents in relation to other people, other human personalities; when you've worked this out, you're done. this truth has to stand out in the end result of the portrait.. ..when this task is complete, and the subject is placed in the realm of the dead that go on living, I hand over my work.

My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey contemporary events. Little by little, my horses become more restless; their riders less and less able to control them. Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe similar to those that struck Sodom and Pompeii. So I am trying to illustrate the last stages of the disintegration of a myth, I mean the myth of the individual victorious hero, the 'uono di virtù' of the humanists..